Sunday, February 20

Fashion Roadkill of the Day: Vol 28

There comes a point in every child's life when the easy free-wheeling all-you-can-eat-candy-times come to a jarring halt. The little darlings grow up and encounter the pressure to perform and achieve certain standards, otherwise it's ADIOS, don't let the door hit you in the butt on the way out! In Hong Kong this generally occurs around the age of five.

I know this because the kid next door often passes out at midnight while doing his complex Fourier series maths homework. He's then waken up at 5am to get ready for Grade 6 piano lessons. Little Royce is a bit of a slow learner because his brother Rolls was already studying for Grade 8 exams at the same age. Not once do his parents stop and say to him: You know what, screw piano. If when you grow up and decide you want to make a career out of shopping mall performances, then we'll let you go on a reality show. Screw the maths too. The bank will work out all the mortgage and interest payments anyway. Here, have a piece of chocolate. And yeah, just so you know, it's not cool to jump off a building if you don't get straight As.

No wonder so many schoolkids turn to unsavoury methods of stress relief. They start experimenting dangerously with fashion and fall deeply into colour abuse, pattern abuse even.

Of course peer pressure has a lot to do with it. At first it's little whiff of tartan (come on, all the cool kids are doing it) or maybe a dash of fluoro green lace crochet (are you in or are you out?), then they find themselves developing a taste for ruffled paisley. Pretty soon, they're HOOKED on the rush that accompanies candycane socks and chunky white platform boots:

What's even worse is that these fashion junkies mature into badly-dressed adults who mate, spawn and drive their spawn to repeating the same mistakes. How to break the vicious cycle? The answer is through drugs. If kids experimented with drugs instead, we would not be having this conversation today.